Bush and Obama - Iraq and GM

I've been a bit struck lately with some similarities in the American polled attitudes about Iraq during the late Bush years, and the GM bailout now in the early Obama years. While the two are not totally symmetrical, it's getting harder and harder to keep them apart. Consider:

1) The amount of money being thrown at both never seems to come to an end. Nobody seems to have a good handle on how much the taxpayers will have to spend in order for both efforts to ultimately prove 'successful'. Certainly in the case of Iraq, it was legitimate to ask whether the decision to invade and its fallout was well thought through or not, especially given what appeared to be a complete inability to correctly forecast the extent of our commitment in personnel, expense and time. It appears many people are now asking the same question about the decision to bail out GM.

2) The poll numbers are trending somewhat consistently on both issues. The public, while not unanimous, initially supported the Iraq war, at least in plurality. That support held up for a while, but began to tank in Bush's second term, despite some legitimate successes on the ground in Bush's last year in office. Similarly, while not unanimous, a plurality of the public seemed to initially favor a government bailout of GM. In theory, this support was based on the idea that it was very important to the health of the nation that the US auto industry, and all the jobs associated with it, survive. But this support now seems to be flagging, as more money is spent keeping GM afloat despite significant job losses resulting from dealership closings, factory suspensions, and discontinuation of known brands like Pontiac.

3) The rationales offered by the proponents of both issues is eerily similar. When the going got tough in Iraq, Bush and his supporters said we needed to stay the course and that now that we were in there, we needed to finish the job. Iraq war proponents have consistently said that they want to get out of Iraq as soon as Iraq can stand on its own. Yet, all attempts at a timetable were heavily resisted by the former administration. The same thing is happening now with GM. I heard Debbie Stabenow, a senator from Michigan with an obvious interest in saving GM, tell exactly the same story about government intervention in GM that Bush was giving on government intervention in Iraq. She told a sycophantic interviewer on MSNBC that she didn't want the government running GM any longer than necessary, but that government involvement is nonetheless necessary for the forseeable future until GM gets its mess straightened out. She talked about the downside of getting out of GM too quickly (sound familiar? - this is her version of the 'premature withdrawal' argument of the Bush people on Iraq). And like the Iraq war proponents, she heavily downplayed the financial cost to the taxpayer of the decision to bail out GM.

As I said at the beginning, I am not suggesting that these two things are exactly the same, or that their respective support and opposition are based on exactly the same reasons. But there are some curious similarities at work here, and one wonders if the Obama people can see the irony of adopting a number of Bush stump speech justifications on Iraq in defense of their decisions about GM.